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But have you checked out our new Esoteric Book Club? First pick is Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology. Participate here!

Saturday Signal: Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

Our Esoteric Book Club officially starts on Monday, but the conversation’s already started, and people have to begun introduce themselves, come join us!

If you missed our earlier announcement, the first pick is Quantum Psychology, by Robert Anton Wilson.

Great stuff.

Now, on with our usual linkage:

• The wonderful blog Gyllene Gryningen has a great post titled “Genie or Genius?” which delves into the history and mythology of the djinn, also discussing possible elemental correspondences. Very nifty.

• Someone’s started a fan page on Facebook for people interested in Buying Crowley Books. They’ve even got a Twitter account (@crowleybooks) now. Via these methods they share info about good places to buy Crowley’s works as so much of it has gone out of print. As of this writing the Facebook page has nearly 700 fans.

• John Griogair Bell points out deficiencies in the Thelemic calendar and recommends some improvements in “Heliocentricity“.

Noise?

• In Letters from Hardscrabble Creek, Chas Clifton wrote a bit about a website he came across which focused on “Having Sex With Ghosts“. Gina “Gnothz” Lanier (what’s a “gnothz”?) is a self-described paranormal investigator who wants to hear about your intimidate relations with the dead. They’re not even funny. One woman complains about obscene phone calls from the dead. It’s just sad. For the voyeuristic with no sense of web design, here’s Real Sex with Ghosts. Oh dear.

Got a cool link? Please share it in the comments, or if you use delicious, tag it “plutonica” and we’ll take a look. Thanks!

Sorry, no time.

Hallowe’en’s but a few short weeks away, and it’s supposed to be the time of the dead, when “the veils are thinnest ‘tween worlds”. Yet, outside obvious fiction, when was the last time you heard of a young ghost?

Recently I reviewed Claude Lecouteux’s The Return of the Dead for SpiralNature.com. In it, the author  delves into Germanic and Scandinavian folklore to discover their pre-Christian beliefs about death and the afterlife, focusing on ghosts and revenants in particular.

He was writing of a time when they were taken to be a very real phenomena, yet for the mainstream, this no longer holds. He writes:

In terms of evolution, having suffered the outrages of time and history, revenants have lost almost everything that distinguished them: their physicality and their powers. They no longer kill or threaten, nor do they perform domestic tasks. They are no longer the tutelary or wicked spirits of an earlier age. Ordinarily, they appear mute, using their eyes or gestures to express what they wish to say, but they no longer have the power to express themselves with words because they are no longer of this world.

Lecouteux attributes their decline to Continue reading »